The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  12

  When the organization of the Red Army was announced, an editorial in Izvestiia welcomed it as follows:

  The workers’ revolution can triumph only on a global scale and for its enduring triumph requires the workers of various countries to offer each other mutual assistance.

  And the socialists of that country where power has first passed into the hands of the proletariat may face the task of assisting, arms in hand, their brothers struggling against the bourgeoisie across the border.

  The complete and final triumph of the proletariat is unthinkable without the triumphant conclusion of a series of wars on the external as well as domestic fronts

  . For this reason, the Revolution cannot manage without its own, socialist army.

  “War is father of everything,” said Heraclitus.

  Through war lies also the road to socialism

  .

  *

  There are many other statements, some explicit, others veiled, to the effect that the Red Army’s mission involved intervention abroad, or, as the decree of January 28, 1918, put it, “providing support to the coming socialist revolutions in Europe.”13

  All this lay in the future. For the time being, the Bolsheviks had only one reliable military force, the Latvian Rifles, whom we have encountered in connection with the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the security of the Kremlin. The Russian army formed the first separate Latvian units in the summer of 1915. In 1915–16, the Latvian Rifles were an all-volunteer force of 8,000 men, strongly nationalistic and with a sizable Social-Democratic contingent.14 Reinforced with Latvian nationals from the regular Russian units, by the end of 1916 they had eight regiments totaling 30,000 to 35,000 men. This force resembled the Czech Legion, concurrently formed in Russia of prisoners of war, although their destinies were to be quite different.

  In the spring of 1917, the Latvian troops reacted favorably to Bolshevik anti-war propaganda, hoping that peace and the principle of “natural self-determination” would allow them to return to their homeland, then under German occupation. Although still more driven by nationalism than socialism, they developed close ties with Bolshevik organizations, adopting their slogans against the Provisional Government. In August 1917, Latvian units distinguished themselves in the defense of Riga.

  The Bolsheviks treated the Latvians differently from all the other units of the Russian army, keeping them intact and entrusting to them vital security operations. They gradually turned it into a combination of the French Foreign Legion and the Nazi SS, a force to protect the regime from internal as well as foreign enemies, partly an army, partly a security police. Lenin trusted them much more than Russians.

  Early plans to create a Worker-Peasant Red Army came to naught. Those who enlisted did so mainly for the pay, which was soon raised from 50 to 150 rubles a month, and the opportunity to loot. Much of the army was riffraff made up of demobilized soldiers, whom Trotsky would later describe as “hooligans” and a Soviet decree would call “disorganizers, troublemakers, and self-seekers.”15 Contemporary newspapers are filled with stories of violent “expropriations” carried out by the early troops of the Red Army: hungry and ill paid, they sold uniforms and military equipment, and sometimes fought each other. In May 1918, having occupied Smolensk, they demanded that Jews be expelled from Soviet institutions in the name of the slogan “Beat Jews and Save Russia.”16 The situation was so bad that the Soviet authorities occasionally had to request German troops to intervene against mutinous Red Army units.17

  Things could not go on like this and Lenin reluctantly began to reconcile himself to the idea of a professional army urged on him by the old General Staff and the French military mission. In February and early March 1918 discussions were held in the party between proponents of a “pure” revolutionary army, composed of workers and democratically structured, and those who favored a more conventional military force. The debate paralleled the one that went on concurrently between advocates of worker control of industry and advocates of professional management. In both instances, considerations of efficiency overruled revolutionary dogma.

  On March 9, 1918, the Sovnarkom appointed a commission to provide in a week a “plan for the establishment of a military center for the reorganization of the army and the creation of a mighty armed force on the basis of a socialist militia and the universal arming of workers and peasants.”18 Krylenko, who had led the opposition to a professional armed force, resigned as Commissar of War and took over the Commissariat of Justice. He was replaced by Trotsky, who had had no military experience, since, like nearly all the Bolshevik leaders, he had dodged the draft. His assignment was to employ as much professional help, foreign and domestic, as required to create an efficient, combat-ready army that would pose no threat to the Bolshevik dictatorship either by defecting to the enemy or by meddling in politics. Concurrently, the government created a Supreme Military Council (Vysshyi Voennyi Soviet), chaired by Trotsky. The council’s staff consisted of officials (the commissars of War and the Navy) and military professionals from the Imperial Army.19 To ensure the complete political reliability of the armed force, the Bolsheviks adopted the institution of “commissars” to supervise military commanders.20

  Trotsky continued military negotiations with the Allies. On March 21, he sent General Lavergne of the French military mission the following note:

  After a conversation with Captain Sadoul, I have the honor to request, in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars, the technical collaboration of the French military mission in the task of reorganizing the army which the government of soviets is undertaking.

  There followed a list of thirty-three French specialists in all branches of the military, including aviation, navy, and intelligence, whom the Russians wanted detailed to them.21 Lavergne assigned three officers from his mission as advisers to the Commissar of War: Trotsky allotted them space near his office. The collaboration was handled very discreetly and is not much talked about in Soviet military histories. Later on, according to Joseph Noulens, Trotsky asked for five hundred French army and several hundred British naval officers; he also discussed military assistance with the U.S. and Italian missions.22

  Organizing a Red Army from scratch, however, was a slow procedure. In the meantime the Germans were advancing southeast into the Ukraine and adjacent areas. In these circumstances, the Bolsheviks undertook to explore whether the Allies would be prepared to help stop the German advance with their own troops. On March 26, the new Commissar of Foreign Affairs, George Chicherin, handed the French Consul General, Fernand Grenard, a note requesting a statement of Allied intentions in the event Russia turned to Japan to help repel German aggression, or to Germany against Japan.23

  The Allied ambassadors, established in Vologda, reacted skeptically to the Bolshevik approaches, which were made through Sadoul. They doubted whether the Bolsheviks really intended to deploy the Red Army against the Germans: as Noulens put it, its more likely use was to serve as a “Praetorian Guard” to solidify their hold on Russia. One can imagine their thoughts as they listened to Sadoul’s impassioned plea on Moscow’s behalf:

  The Bolsheviks will form an army, well or badly, but they cannot do it seriously without our assistance. And, inevitably, someday this army will stand up to Imperial Germany, the worst enemy of Russian democracy. On the other hand, because the new army will be disciplined, staffed by professionals and permeated with the military spirit, it will not be an army suited for a civil war. If we direct its formation, as Trotsky has proposed to us, it will become a factor of internal stability and an instrument of national defense at the Allies’ disposal. The de-Bolshevization which we will thus accomplish in the army will have reverberations in the general policies of Russia. Do we not see already the beginnings of this evolution? One must be blinded by prejudice not to see, through the unavoidable brutalities, the rapid adaptation of the Bolsheviks to a realistic policy.

  24

  This plea must be one of the very earliest cl
aims on record that the Bolsheviks were “evolving” toward realism.

  For all their suspicions, the Allied ambassadors did not want to reject the Soviet request out of hand. Communicating frequently with their governments as well as with Trotsky, they reached on April 3 an understanding among themselves on the following principles: (1) the Allies (without the United States, which refused to go along) will assist the organization of the Red Army, with the proviso that Moscow reintroduces military discipline, including the death penalty; (2) the Soviet Government will consent to Japanese landings on Russian soil: the Japanese forces, meshed with Allied units sent from Europe, will form a multinational force to fight the Germans; (3) Allied contingents will occupy Murmansk and Archangel; (4) the Allies will refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Russia.*

  While these talks were in progress, on April 4 the Japanese landed a small expeditionary force in Vladivostok. Its ostensible mission was to protect Japanese citizens, two of whom had recently been murdered there. But it was widely and correctly believed that the true objective of the Japanese was to seize and annex Russia’s maritime provinces. Russian military experts pointed out that the collapse of transport and the breakdown of civic authority in Siberia precluded the movement of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, with the vast logistic support they required, to European Russia. But the Allies persisted in this plan, promising to dilute the Japanese expeditionary force with French, English, and Czechoslovak units.

  At the beginning of June, the English landed 1,200 additional troops at Murmansk and 100 at Archangel.

  Lenin did not give up hope of American economic aid to supplement the military help promised by France. The United States continued to profess amity for Russia even after the Brest Treaty had been ratified. The Department of State notified the Japanese that the United States continued to regard Russia and her people as “friends and allies against a common enemy” although she did not recognize her government.25 On another occasion Washington declared that in spite of “all the unhappiness and misery” which the Russian Revolution had caused, it felt for it “the greatest sympathy.”26 Curious to know what these friendly professions meant concretely, Lenin on April 3 again asked Robins to sound out his government on the possibility of economic “cooperation.”27 In mid-May, he gave him a note for Washington which stated that the United States could replace Germany as the principal supplier of industrial equipment.28 Unlike German business circles, the Americans showed little interest.

  It is impossible to determine how far Bolshevik collaboration with the Allies might have gone, or even how seriously it was intended. The Bolsheviks, aware that the Germans knew of their every step, may well have made these overtures to force Germany to observe the terms of the Brest Treaty or risk pushing Russia into Allied arms. Be that as it may, the Germans came around and assured the Bolsheviks that they had no hostile intentions. In April the two countries exchanged diplomatic missions and made ready for talks on a commercial agreement. In mid-May, Berlin, abandoning the hard line advocated by the generals, advised Moscow it would occupy no more Russian territory. Lenin publicly confirmed these assurances in a talk he gave on May 14.29 They paved the way for a Russo-German rapprochement. “When it emerged in the course of German-Russian relations that Germany did not intend to overthrow [the Bolsheviks], Trotsky gave up” the idea of Allied assistance.* From now on, relations between the Bolsheviks and the Allies rapidly deteriorated, as Moscow moved into the orbit of Imperial Germany, which seemed about to win the war.

  83. Kurt Riezler.

  Rebuffed by Moscow, the Allied missions in Russia had to confine themselves to desultory talks with pro-Allied opposition groups. Noulens, who was the most active in this regard, viewed Russians much like his German counterpart, Mirbach, as inept and passive, waiting on foreigners to liberate them. The Russian “bourgeoisie” impressed him as utterly devoid of initiative.30

  In the second half of April 1918, Russia and Germany exchanged embassies: Ioffe went to Berlin, and Mirbach came to Moscow. The Germans were the first foreign mission accredited to Bolshevik Russia. To their surprise, the train in which they traveled was guarded by Latvians. One of the German diplomats wrote that the reception given them by the Muscovites was surprisingly warm: he thought that no victor had ever been so welcomed.31

  The head of the mission, Count Mirbach, was a forty-seven-year-old career diplomat with considerable experience in Russian affairs. In 1908–11 he had served as counselor in the German Embassy in St. Petersburg and in December 1917 headed the mission to Petrograd. He came from a wealthy and aristocratic family of Prussian Catholics.† A diplomat of the old school, he was dismissed by some colleagues as a “rococo count,” ill suited to deal with revolutionaries, but his tact and self-control earned him the confidence of the Foreign Office.

  His right-hand man, Kurt Riezler, a thirty-six-year-old philosopher, also had much experience in Russian affairs.* In 1915, he played a part in Parvus’s unsuccessful attempt to secure Lenin’s cooperation. Posted to Stockholm in 1917, he served as the principal intermediary between the German Government and Lenin’s agents, whom he paid subsidies from the so-called Riezler Fund for transfer to Russia. He is said to have assisted the Bolsheviks in carrying out the October coup, although his exact role in it is not clear. Like many of his compatriots, he welcomed the coup as a “miracle” that could save Germany. At Brest he advocated a conciliatory policy. Temperamentally, however, he was a pessimist who thought Europe was doomed no matter who won the war.

  The third prominent member of the German mission was the military attaché, Karl von Bothmer, who reflected the views of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. He despised the Bolsheviks and believed Germany should be rid of them.32

  None of the three German diplomats knew Russian. All the Russian leaders with whom they came into contact spoke fluent German.

  The Foreign Office instructed Mirbach to support the Bolshevik Government and under no conditions to enter into communication with the Russian opposition. He was to inform himself of the true situation in Soviet Russia and of the activities there of Allied agents, as well as to lay the groundwork for the commercial negotiations between the countries stipulated by the Brest Treaty. The German mission, twenty diplomats and an equal number of clerical staff, took over a luxurious private residence on Denezhnyi Pereulok, off Arbat, the property of a German sugar magnate who wanted to keep it out of Communist hands.

  Mirbach had been to Petrograd several months earlier and must have known what to expect: even so, he was appalled by what he saw. “The streets are very lively,” he reported to Berlin a few days after his arrival,

  but they seem populated exclusively by proletarians; better-dressed people are rarely to be seen—it is as if the previous ruling class and the bourgeoisie had vanished from the face of the earth.… The priests, who previously had made up a goodly part of the public, have similarly disappeared from the streets. In the shops one can find mainly dusty remains of previous splendors, offered at fantastic prices. Pervasive avoidance of work and mindless idling are the characteristics of this overall picture. Since the factories are at a standstill and the soil remains largely uncultivated—at any rate, that was the impression we gained from our trip—Russia appears headed for a still greater catastrophe than the one inflicted on her by the [Bolshevik] coup.

  Public security leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, one can move about freely and alone in the daytime. In the evening, however, it is no longer advisable to leave one’s house: one hears the frequent sounds of shooting and there seem to be continuous smaller and larger clashes …

  Bolshevik mastery over Moscow is maintained, first and foremost, by the

  Latvian

  battalions. It depends furthermore on the numerous automobiles which the government has requisitioned: these constantly race across the city, delivering the troops, as they are needed, to endangered spots.

  Where these conditions will lead cannot be determined as yet,
but one cannot deny them for the moment the prospects of a certain stability.

  33

  Riezler was equally depressed by Bolshevik-ruled Moscow: he was struck most by the pervasive corruption of Communist officials and their loose habits, especially their insatiable demand for women.34

  In mid-May, Mirbach met with Lenin, whose self-confidence surprised him:

  Lenin, in general, believes with rocklike firmness in his star and professes, over and over again, in an almost insistent manner, to a boundless optimism. At the same time, he also concedes that even though his regime still remains intact, the number of its enemies has grown and the situation calls for “more intense attention than even one month ago.” He bases his self-confidence above all on the fact that the ruling party alone disposes of organized power, whereas all the other [parties] agree only in rejecting the existing regime; in other respects, however, they fly apart in all directions and have no power to match that of the Bolsheviks.

  *

  35

  After one month in the Soviet capital, Mirbach began to experience misgivings about the viability of the Bolshevik regime and the wisdom of his government’s basing its entire Russian policy on it. He continued to believe that the Bolsheviks were likely to survive: on May 24, he warned the Foreign Office against Bothmer and the other military men who predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet regime.36 But aware of the activities of Allied diplomatic and military personnel in Russia and their contacts with the opposition groups, he worried that should Lenin fall from power, the Germans would be left without any source of support in Russia. He favored, therefore, a more flexible policy combining reliance on the Bolsheviks with political insurance in the form of openings to the anti-Bolshevik opposition.